janna watson is a conceptual painter based in toronto, canada. through her practice, janna works to reframe spirituality from the dogmatic into objects reflecting an embodied spirituality that includes fluidity, agility, and joy. she communicates this by queering the painterly process into one that is diversely applied, gestural, and multi-oriented. janna intentionally forgoes the use of borders on her paintings to create a sense of the infinite and the inherent vulnerability of a spirituality that is not contained by a canon.

beginning with her canvases on the ground, janna approaches each painting without preconceptions of visual direction. composition, colour, and texture are developed intuitively and in direct response to the artist’s emotive and embodied state in that moment. orientation is eschewed entirely. the artist describes her process as a way of moving away from the cognitive realm and toward the spiritual, and her paintings as alternative spaces free from the social structures we are conditioned by. for janna, unlike her art historical predecessors, this practice is not merely a formalist gesture but extends from her experience with speaking in tongues, a ritual practised in the pentecostal religion in which individuals make sounds that resemble speech, often considered to be a divine language unknown to anyone, even the participant. the conceptual structure of this act is mirrored in janna’s painterly practice and acts as an index from her past to her present.